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Friday, 5 September 2008

Ashley / Hunters / Vaughans / Deez update

Regular readers of Three Thousand Versts will remember my preoccupation with the future of a bar on the Lisburn Road, which has been known variously as the Ashley, Hunters, Vaughans and Deez (yes, with a ‘z’, exactly). The previous exciting instalment had Deez reverting to its old management and purportedly reinstating the much superior Hunters moniker.

That seemed to be a happy ending of sorts. Alas, more than two months later, the gaudy yellow and pink colour scheme was still there, deafening music was still rendering conversation in the bar difficult, the bloke who apparently ran Deez was spotted drinking at the bar and to add insult to considerable injury, Sky Sports and Setanta were no longer available.

Bringing things right up to date, the bar has been shut for the past week or so. This is, to put it mildly, unfortunate timing. Northern Ireland play the Czech Republic at home on Wednesday night and Hunters is easily the closest pub to Windsor Park. The most benign interpretation of the current closure is that, finally, perhaps work is planned to remove all the paraphernalia of Deez and return the bar to its original (or at least pre ‘E:at, D:rink, D:ance’) incarnation.

For God’s sake get it right this time! Give us a plain ordinary pub, a menu of steak and burgers and the football on big screens.

5 comments:

Having been the one who "broke" the story of Deez returning to Hunter's glory, I was embarrassed as well as disappointed that it hasn't materialised in all this time.

I hope your suspicions are right. The place has been virtually empty for most of July and August so they need to do something.

They really need Setanta/Sky back too. A friend of mine was looking for a pub to watch the Liverpool match last Sunday and ended up having to go back home because all the open pubs were showing some f**king garlic match. (It's not like there are that many culchies in Belfast over the summer!)

Anyway, as it was his birthday and we were all going out after it, the pubs probably lost a fair amount of business as about a dozen of us got lashed in his house instead of in a pub. That said, I'm a tight arse so it suited me ok ;)

I assume this "fucking garlic match" was the Tyrone v Wexford All-Ireland semi-final, Beano. I watched it in a pub in north London, where it was shown on the screen at the front for the benefit of cuchie yokel bogtrotters like myself, while down at the back the highly sophisticated cosmopolitan soccer fans could watch the Liverpool match while sipping cappuccinos and discussing Sartre's theory of existentialism and the conflict between individual consciousness and the pressure to conform within a de-individualised post-industrial society. This way everybody was happy. And Tyrone won, so to celebrate we launched into an impromptu session of "Duelling Banjos" and went joyriding on a Massey Ferguson.

I also had problems finding a pub with the Liverpool - Villa match last week. Ryans hasn't got Sky either. The Bot was showing Liverpool on two oversubscribed screens with the rest tuned into that Gaelic match. We decided to cross the road to the Eg (the Bot's spillover pub in many ways) but it was shut down as well! Ended up crammed into a wee corner of the Bot attempting to see a wee screen in the far distance.